


Long Past Dawn

by urdearestmom



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:34:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 14,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24896260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/urdearestmom/pseuds/urdearestmom
Summary: The paint was a fresh shade of blue, with white trimming, and there were flower boxes in the windows. The porch looked brand new, and the kitchen door was wooden instead of the metal one Max knew she had opened not fifteen minutes ago. There was a clothesline by the side of the house, hung with some dresses, pants, and aprons, flapping in the breeze.Then she blinked, and the image was gone.
Relationships: Dustin Henderson & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Maxine "Max" Mayfield, Eleven | Jane Hopper & Mike Wheeler, Eleven | Jane Hopper/Mike Wheeler, Maxine "Max" Mayfield & Lucas Sinclair
Comments: 15
Kudos: 16





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> What up everybody!!!!!! It's been almost a year since I last posted haha idek who's going to read this
> 
> In february I reread a book I read as a child and was struck with inspiration for this story. It is based on that book. Since then I have been planning and have plans for about 8 chapters currently but there will be more. Hopefully I can keep a steady update schedule with this fic but I'm not sure how it will work out
> 
> Let me know what you thought in the comments below!

Max didn’t think much of the house as her mom parked the car in front of it. It was an old farmhouse on the outskirts of a tiny Midwest town. Half the bars of the wraparound porch were rotting and most of the paint was peeling off if not completely gone, revealing first a dusty red and then sky blue under the spotted white, which gave way to aged grey wood. 

“Are you excited?” Asked her mom. 

_Not really,_ thought Max. “Sure,” she replied. “It has potential.” 

It was a Sunday. Tomorrow she’d be starting at a new school, coming in a month after starting her junior year in the city. Her mom was going to be marrying her boyfriend, Neil, in mid-October, so they’d thought it would be great to all move in together before the wedding as “preparation for living as a family” and luckily moving day landed on a weekend. 

Neil himself wasn’t so bad, at least not to Max or her mom which was Max’s main concern, but his son was a nightmare. Billy was probably just all-around the worst person Max had ever met. He was arrogant, cocky, and mean, and Max just didn’t get why he had to be her problem. She’d never wanted a brother. 

“Speak of the devil,” she grumbled. Billy had appeared on the porch as soon as she stepped out of the car. 

“Welcome home, Max,” he greeted, spreading his arms as if standing in the entrance to some glamourous palace. “Hi, Susan.” 

Max’s mom came around the side of the car smiling. “Hello, Billy! Why don’t you help your sister get some boxes into the house? I’ll be right back,” she added, making her way up the steps. 

Billy came toward Max without saying anything, so she decided to ignore him and start getting boxes out of the trunk. 

“I don’t care what she says,” he said as he reached her. “You’re _not_ my sister.” 

Their parents were always forcing the idea of the two being siblings onto them, even though clearly neither of them agreed with it. Billy had said this same thing to her dozens of times. 

Max rolled her eyes. “You say that like I _want_ to be your sister. I don’t like this any more than you do.” 

“Good.” 

Walking into the house, the porch actually didn’t feel as rickety as it looked, which Max supposed was a good thing. The front door opened into a mudroom sort of area, past which Max could see a room with a fireplace and what was probably the kitchen at the end of the hall. Her mom and Neil were standing in there going over some papers on the counter. 

She passed a staircase leading to the upper level halfway down the hall and decided to set her boxes on it for a moment. 

“Mom?” She called. 

Her mom looked up. “Yes?”

“Which one is my room?” 

“Whichever one Billy didn’t put his boxes in,” said Neil. “Ours is the one right off the stairs.” 

On the second floor, there was a room right off the stairs just like Neil had said, with a bedframe in it and a mattress surrounded by boxes. The room in the middle of the hall also had boxes on the floor, as well as a crumpled Coke can and some errant food wrappers. That left the room at the end of the hall, over the kitchen and facing the back of the property. 

Stepping into it, Max was impressed by the amount of sunlight let in by the windows. The ceiling was slanted but fairly high above her, which was a change from her room in the old house. She set her boxes on the floor and went to take a look outside. 

From her window she could see all the way down to the edge of the property, which was a bit of a distance. Clearly the people who’d originally lived here had been farmers, judging by the fields in the distance. She wondered if the fields still came with the house, or if they were owned by someone else now. 

There was a creek bubbling along where the grass met the trees on the border fence with the neighbours, and Max liked that although the front of the property was entirely wooded save for the driveway and a bit of space around the house, the back had quite a bit of empty grass. There were of course bushes and trees, and she could see some kind of structure near the creek that looked like it might be a storage shed or a small cabin. It looked interesting, so she decided she would go take a look once she had all her boxes up in her room.

* * *

Close up, the shed really did look like a little house. It even had a chimney. _Who knows_ , Max thought, _maybe it was a house._ The door gave way with a little push, and she found the inside was just big enough to have been a sleeping space for a few people, with a bit more room on the side where the chimney was. Her first impression was that it was dusty, and it looked like some animals had made a home of it in one corner. Probably raccoons. There were also some gardening implements scattered around the room, so it likely had been used as a shed too.

The grass grew tall around the walls, and the bushes almost obscured the double doors in the ground. Max would have tumbled over them and straight into the creek if she hadn’t seen the rusty latch sticking up. She was confused for a second but then she realized it must be a root cellar. She remembered hearing about them in third grade social studies when they learned about pioneers. It looked like it was just as old as the house, and for a second Max wondered how old the house actually was. 

When she lifted the latch and pulled the doors open, the strong smell of dirt hit her nose. There were steps leading into the darkness, dug directly out of the soil, with rotting planks still covering some. For some reason, this root cellar seemed to be pulling Max into it. She couldn’t fathom why, but something was telling her that it was important. 

Of course, there was nothing in there. There was some wood on the ground that had probably been shelves at some point, but other than that it appeared as though the root cellar hadn’t been in use for a very long time. Max was disappointed to find that it was nothing but a musty hole in the ground. 

As she turned back toward the house, the creek behind Max seemed to get louder for a moment, and when it did, something strange happened. The old, peeling, desolate-looking farmhouse didn’t look anything like it had a second before. It was almost like a superimposed image, except Max was looking at it with her own eyes. 

The paint was a fresh shade of blue, with white trimming, and there were flower boxes in the windows. The porch looked brand new, and the kitchen door was wooden instead of the metal one Max knew she had opened not fifteen minutes ago. There was a clothesline by the side of the house, hung with some dresses, pants, and aprons, flapping in the breeze. 

Then she blinked, and the image was gone. The old house was back, and there was no breeze. It was actually the hottest day of September so far and the air felt stagnant. Max wondered if maybe the heat was getting to her and giving her hallucinations.

Inside the kitchen it was a bit cooler, but Max still stopped to have a glass of water and clear her head before heading back up to her room. While she was outside, the men had brought in her bedframe and mattress from the moving truck that had arrived earlier, so she got around to building it back up. 

Her mom called her down for lunch right after she’d finished making her bed. She was sitting at the table in front of a plate of sandwiches, pouring herself a drink from the lemonade pitcher. Billy had apparently decided to eat outside, as was obvious by his shadow in the window, and Neil was nowhere to be found. 

Max sat down and helped herself to a sandwich. 

“So how are you liking the house so far, Max?” 

Max swallowed. “It’s fine, I guess,” she said, shrugging. “I like the back. Did you see that little shed thing down there?” 

Her mom nodded. “We saw it when we checked out the property but I haven’t really thought about it much.”

Max didn’t say anything for a moment, but then she remembered the vision she’d seen. “Mom, do you have any idea how old this place is?”

“I don’t remember exactly, but it’s in the papers somewhere. I know it’s at least a hundred years old,” she offered. “We have a chain of title that shows all the owners of the property since- oh, I don’t know, 1840-something.”

“That’s cool.” 

Ms. Mayfield furrowed her brows. “Why are you asking? I never thought history was something you were interested in.” 

Max leaned back, chewing. “No reason. It just looks so old I wondered.” 

After that, her mom let it go. Max spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking all her stuff from the boxes, hanging what needed to be hung in her closet and leaving the rest of her clothes stacked in piles on the floor along with some books and other stuff she hadn’t thrown out before moving. She built her desk and set it up in the corner near the window so she’d get a lot of light, but her dresser would have to wait until tomorrow. 

It was early evening when she found herself sitting at the desk watching the sunset. Her bedroom windows faced west, giving her a wonderful view. The temperature was finally dipping to a more acceptable September level as the sun fell below the horizon, and Max wondered what Dustin would have thought of this place. 

It was the first time all day that she had thought about him, surprising herself. A huge part of her not wanting to leave her hometown was that that had been the place where she had known him and grown up with him, and also the place where he had departed. He had been an enormous part of her life and that city was her main connection to him. 

Her mom had thought it would be good for her to get away from that place and give herself time to heal, but Max wasn’t sure she agreed. It had been almost a year and she was still struggling to cope with the loss. It was hard not to blame herself even when everyone else told her it wasn’t her fault.

Looking out on the wooded landscape with its green trees and grass and bushes and the little creek running through, Max decided Dustin would have loved her new house. It looked just like the set of every one of his adventure stories. She was thinking about how exactly he would explain that shed and root cellar and her very weird vision of the pretty house when she noticed movement outside. 

Someone was walking around by the shed. At first Max thought it was her mom because it clearly wasn’t a man, but she quickly scrapped that idea because the woman was a brunette with a long braid down her back. Max’s mom had bright red hair just like her, and she didn’t own any ankle length dresses either. 

It looked like the woman was carrying a bucket of something- maybe milk?- and headed in the direction of the cellar. Max only looked away for a second as she got up to look closer, but when she looked back, the woman was gone. Vanished straight into thin air with no trace of her. 

“What the hell?” Murmured Max. Something very strange was definitely going on at this place. The longer she thought about it, the more she realized… maybe the woman was a ghost. The dress she’d been wearing looked old-fashioned, like Anne of Green Gables old-fashioned, and that was in line with the age of the house. 

Seeing ghosts was the last thing she needed. Max already had too many nightmares about death. 

At dinner she decided to bring it up, but nobody seemed to believe her. None of them had seen anyone either. Billy went so far as to call her stupid and ask what kind of drugs she was on, to which her mother didn’t react. Neil only clenched his jaw, but it was enough to shut Billy up. She could hear them yelling outside as she made her way to the bathroom between hers and Billy’s bedrooms to shower before bed. 

Later, Max was sitting on her bed braiding her wet hair, looking into the darkness outside. It had been a long day to say the least. But something outside kept calling her. She needed to find out more. The most she could do tonight was at least go investigate the scene of the sighting, right? 

There was no deliberation. She threw on the closest sweater and snatched a flashlight out of what was quickly becoming the junk drawer in the kitchen on her way out the back door. The darkness of the yard was only lightly illuminated by the moon, but Max’s flashlight beam cut through easily. 

As she drew closer to the shed and the cellar, she wasn’t sure whether she was supposed to feel scared. If she _had_ seen a ghost, who was to say it wasn’t malevolent? What if it was waiting for her? Maybe she’d been the only one to see it because it had wanted her to be the only one. But at the same time, nothing about the woman had seemed creepy or threatening other than her being a stranger… and nothing had seemed scary about Max’s vision of the house, either, which she was sure was related. 

Soon enough, the flashlight beam hit the side of the shed. Max walked all around it and found no signs of anyone being there. She checked inside and found it empty. The bucket the woman had been carrying wasn’t anywhere. The doors to the root cellar were closed with the latch, which they wouldn’t be if someone was inside, so that was another possibility eliminated. 

Max was starting to doubt herself. Maybe she’d imagined all of it. It certainly seemed like it, and it was the only thing that made sense. She didn’t put much stock in her ghost theory. 

“Okay,” she said to herself as she marched back to the house. “I have school tomorrow and I need to sleep. Stop thinking about ghosts.” 

But she struggled to fall asleep that night, her mind racing with possible explanations for what she’d seen. She knew she wasn’t crazy. Something had to be off about this place, and Max was going to find out. 


	2. Chapter 2

Monday morning came bright and early. Since Max lived on the edge of town and the high school was in the central area, she had a long ride ahead of her and had to get up before everyone else. It was barely dawn when her alarm clock went off. 

Before she left, she grabbed some food out of the fridge and dumped it haphazardly into her backpack. She didn’t have many books taking up space yet. Her skateboard sat on the porch until she picked it up and started walking toward the road. 

The one good thing about it being so early was that there was no one else on the roads, at least not out where she lived. She guessed that meant the neighbours probably didn’t have any school aged kids. Or maybe they did and they just got driven to school. Who knew. Max wasn’t overly concerned with other people’s lives. 

It was nice to feel the sunrise on her face as she headed east into town. Driving through the day before, she hadn’t really paid much attention to it, but skating through was slower. The fields around her house gave way to residential streets with houses that all looked like the picture-perfect suburban home for the all-American family. In itself it wasn’t a bad ideal, but Max liked houses with a little more character. 

Those streets eventually led into the centre of town, where Max skated past the police station with two cruisers sitting out front, and the post office where the mailman was getting ready for his morning run. Main Street was lined with shops, but she remembered from the map her mom had given her last night that all three schools were on the next street, with the elementary and middle schools across from the high school. 

It was nearing time for first period, so the parking lot was filling up. Max skated right up to the doors and walked in, her board under one arm. The secretary in the main office gave her her schedule and her locker information, then sent her off. 

Her locker was on the other side of the building, so she walked through halls full of students. Nobody particularly stood out to her as looking like they were staring at her, so she minded her business. It was nice to go unnoticed at school for once. Like things had been before last year.

Her first period was Algebra II, followed by PE and then lunch. She went and sat outside for lunch, enjoying the nice weather while it lasted. Midwestern winters always hit hard and fast. Third period was American History, where her teacher announced that their class was now going to begin a semester-long project on a topic of the student’s choosing, but that it would be done in partners that had already been picked. Max was paired with a boy from the front of the classroom named Lucas. 

Lucas sat in the desk next to Max as the class rearranged itself and introduced himself. 

“You’re new here, right? I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” he said. 

Max nodded. “I moved yesterday.” 

He looked surprised. “You moved yesterday and you’re already at school?” 

She shrugged. “My mom said I was lucky moving day was on a weekend so I wouldn’t have to miss school. It’s fine.”

Lucas shrugged. “Okay, so do you have any ideas for what you want to do on this project?” 

Max didn’t have any. It was her first day in class. But Lucas didn’t seem to mind her silence, rambling on about his thoughts and possible things they could do for their project. Max thought it was kind of cute, the way he seemed so passionate about the topic. Eventually their teacher called them all back to their regular seats and started the actual lecture, sending Lucas back to the front. 

At the end of class, the teacher called her over. 

“I just wanted to welcome you to my class,” he told her. “I hope you don’t have any problems with Lucas, he’s an exemplary student and I thought he could help you ease into the semester here.” 

Max picked at her jeans awkwardly. “He’s fine, thank you.” 

Mr. Beemer smiled. “Well, that’s settled then. Please let me know if there’s anything you need help with, alright?” 

Max said that she would and headed off to English. The end of the school day rolled around fairly quickly, and she found she didn’t hate the block scheduling this school had like she thought she would. She’d been used to having six periods since middle school, but it wasn’t a bad change. 

She was skating home, already out past the cookie cutter houses and into the fields, when she noticed someone ahead of her. Someone familiar. 

“Lucas?” 

He looked back and slowed his pedalling when he realized it was her, letting her catch up to him. 

“Hey,” he greeted. “You live out here?” 

Lucas was going slower than before but Max still had to push off hard to keep up evenly. “Yeah,” she answered quickly. “Just up the road. Old white farmhouse.” 

He pondered her statement for a moment. “The one you can barely see from the street?” 

“How many are there?” 

Lucas laughed. “You’re right. Out here it’s pretty much just us. I had no idea people were moving in, though.” 

Max didn’t say anything else, so Lucas took it upon himself to continue the conversation. “Well, I live next door, other side of the woods by the creek. It’s more like two blocks distance if we were in town.” 

“Do you live in an old ass house too?” 

He shook his head. “There used to be one, apparently, but the previous owners tore it down and built a new one. That’s what my parents bought.”

Max thought for a second. Maybe Lucas would know something about the strange occurrences yesterday. 

“Do you know anything about this area? These houses?” She asked. 

Lucas looked at her questioningly. “Why? Did you see something?” 

He knew immediately what she was getting at. Either he was psychic or Max wasn’t the only person who’d had those experiences before. 

“If you mean creepy stuff like ghosts… I’ve never seen anything,” he continued. “But nobody’s ever lived in your house for very long. I’ve heard rumours about weird stuff happening, people seeing ghosts. I like to think that I’m a man of science, so I don’t really believe there isn’t another explanation, but the fact stands that nobody stays for long.”

He only added to Max’s ghost theory. She’d really hoped there might be another way to explain what happened, but if other people had seen similar things… The image of the woman she saw in the yard yesterday came to her again, startlingly clear.

Max didn’t have anything much else to say to him, but she thanked Lucas for being kind to her and said she would see him again tomorrow when they got to the dirt driveway that led to her house. Her mom and Neil had said they would be out buying furniture and other stuff for most of the afternoon, so she wasn’t expecting them home, and Billy was supposed to be job hunting. There were no cars out front, confirming an empty house. 

She grabbed some fruit from the kitchen and ascended the stairs to her room. After eating, Max decided to put together her dresser so she could get the rest of her clothes off the floor. She didn’t want to dive straight into homework, and all she needed to do was put the drawers back into place anyway. While she did that, she thought about how her school day would have gone if Dustin had been with her. 

He would’ve loved Algebra but made fun of the teacher (Mr. Ermet, pronounced er-may, looked like a mole rat with glasses in a tweed suit). PE had been the site of all of Dustin’s worst school moments, so he hated the class with a passion. Max thought he would’ve liked Mr. Beemer, and she was fairly sure he would have gotten along really well with Lucas too. English had been a favourite subject as well, and the teacher for that class was pretty nice. 

She blinked back tears. In all, it would’ve been a normal day at school with her best friend. It wasn’t a hard day, but it would’ve been a little easier if he’d been there to share it with her. She missed him too much to put into words. 

Sometimes Max wondered why she never felt this way about her dad, who’d died before she’d had the chance to remember him. Maybe she should feel worse,  _ because  _ she’d been robbed of knowing her father, but she didn’t because there wasn’t anything to miss. It’s hard to reminisce when you never actually knew the person. It’s very different when it’s your best friend who you’ve grown up with that dies right in front of you.

To get away from her depressive thoughts, Max focused on her homework. Algebra was fairly easy, just a few problem sets her teacher had assigned her to get a feel for where she was at, and English was just to read a handout and answer some analysis questions. History hadn’t gotten any homework, but she was still stumped on what to do for her project with Lucas. He’d presented some good ideas, but none of them really stuck out to her. 

Eventually, she ended up falling asleep at the desk with her head on her arms, the sunlight warming her face.

* * *

She was driving. It was a blank stretch of road through the forest just outside the city. Her mom had taken her practice driving there a thousand times. Max knew where she was going and exactly what was going to happen. It was almost like she was sitting in a movie theater watching it all unfold, except she was in the driver’s seat. She’d had this dream countless times before. 

Dustin was gesticulating wildly in the passenger seat beside her, telling her all about how he’d built a radio whose signal reached all the way to Utah and that he’d talked to a girl from Salt Lake City named Suzie. He was super excited to tell his mentor, their middle school science teacher. Unfortunately, in all his excitement, Dustin had forgotten to fasten his seatbelt. 

At the time, Max hadn’t noticed, and if she had she probably wouldn’t have mentioned it anyway, but every time she had this dream she wanted to scream at him to put it on and never forget again because it was going to save his life. 

But she was excited to be driving without her mom. It was still a new feeling, having all this freedom, and Max was fully enjoying it. Suddenly, her headlights cut across a deer in the middle of the dark road and she swerved to avoid it, sending the car straight into the trees. All she could hear was her own blood-curdling scream.

They crashed into a tree almost immediately, the front crumpling like a tin can. Max’s seat belt held her down but her head ricocheted against the seat so hard she blacked out for a few seconds. She looked to her right expecting to see Dustin there, even though she already knew he wasn’t. 

It was always at this part of the dream that Max tried to wake herself up. Sometimes it worked, other times she would make so much noise that she woke up her mom. Sometimes- 

“Wake up!”

Sometimes it was Billy. He was standing over her with an angry expression, fists clenched. 

“What are you crying about, you stupid bitch? Can’t a guy get some peace around here?” He yelled. 

Max stood up and pushed him away from her. “Get out, Billy!” 

His hand whipped forward and gripped her wrist hard as he leaned in close to her face. “Don’t you dare push me like that again,” he seethed. 

“Let- go of me!” She ripped her arm out of his hand and ran past him down the hall to the stairs. She didn’t know where she was going, she just knew she needed to get away from Billy before he seriously hurt her. He’d never done anything like that before but Max was sure he could and she didn’t want to find out what he was capable of. 

Her feet led her out into the yard and she ended up at the doors to the root cellar. Billy likely wouldn’t come looking for her out there. One of the many trees around back of the shed cast its shadow over the cellar doors, one side completely dark and the other bathed in sunlight. Max yanked the latch up and dove into the dirt room without a second thought. 

As the door closed over her head, she was encased completely in darkness and got turned around for a moment, but she quickly found the back wall and leaned against it. She decided to wait for some time before going outside again, to give Billy time to calm down. 

Soon, too soon, she heard footsteps in the grass. Billy must have realized where she went after all. Max steeled herself. 

When the doors opened above her, she didn’t see Billy. In fact, what she did see confused her to no end. 

There were shelves on the walls full of jars and crates of vegetables arranged on the floor. There was even a bucket of milk in one corner. Most confusing of all, the person entering the root cellar was the same person she had seen outside in the yard the day before, even wearing the same dress. 

The woman- no, girl, Max could see that now as she approached. The girl didn’t look like she was more than Max’s own sixteen. She stopped as she reached the bottom and saw Max. 

“My word,” she said. “Who are you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everybody! Thank you to those who left me lovely comments on the first chapter <3 I hope you enjoyed this second one and let me know what you thought of it! What do you think is going on and who is this mysterious girl...?


	3. Chapter 3

Max didn’t know how to react. The person in front of her was definitely solid and real; nothing ghostly about her. 

The girl crossed her arms. “Well? What’s your name? You’d better tell me quick, the missus doesn’t take kindly to strangers in her cellar.” 

Max swallowed. “My name is Max.” 

“Is it short for Maxine? I’ve never met a girl named Max before,” said the girl. “In fact I’ve never seen a girl in britches before either! What sort of clothes are those?” 

Something had to be very wrong here. In what world were Max’s clothes weird? She was wearing a t-shirt and jeans like she almost always did. She would’ve said this girl’s clothes were weird, clearly last century fashion.

“I could ask you the same,” Max replied. “I’ve never seen someone dressed like you either, except in movies.”

“What’s a movie?” 

Okay, something was _definitely_ wrong. Max decided not to say anything else on it. 

The girl observed her for a moment longer before picking a jar off the shelf closest to her and turning back up the steps, which Max now noticed were brand new and not rotted like she knew them.

“Are you lost? I suppose I might be able to help you, I’m about to have my lunch,” said the girl. “I can give you some food.” 

Max wasn’t really hungry, but she agreed and followed the girl out of the cellar and into the yard. Upon reaching the top, she realized several things: it had been early evening when she ran away from Billy and now it was high noon, the shed beside the root cellar was completely gone, and the house looked just like how it had in the strange mirage she’d seen yesterday. 

“Alright,” said the girl. “You stay put right here and I’ll be back with some lunch.” 

Max thought it was a reasonable plan of action. She didn’t see any other people nearby, but no doubt “the missus” was in the house. Looking around, everything seemed brighter somehow, and Max realized it was because none of the trees were losing leaves like they had already started to the week before. It looked like springtime, with flowers and other plants blooming all over. But that didn’t make sense. How could it be springtime when it was fall? And how it could be the middle of the day when it had been evening the last time Max was outside? 

She could only come up with one logical conclusion that tied all of it together, but it didn’t seem real. Had she time travelled through the root cellar? She didn’t want to think of what it could mean. Would she even be able to get home? Then again, maybe that wasn’t so bad. Home wasn’t the greatest place.

In a few minutes, the girl was coming back. She was holding something wrapped in cloth and her long brown braid swished behind her in the breeze. She looked displeased and was grumbling to herself.

As she reached Max, she smiled kindly and handed her the cloth. “Hold this for a moment, would you?” 

Max watched as she walked back in the direction of the house and around the side, then heard her voice as it carried across the yard. 

“Michael Wheeler, you get down off that roof before your mother sees you!” 

Max was sure that Michael’s mother had already heard the commotion, but in a few seconds the girl was coming back around the house towards her, accompanied by a dark-haired boy. He was dressed similarly in an old-fashioned style, in a white buttoned shirt tucked into pants held up by suspenders, only he was barefoot. Max guessed he probably lived here and didn’t care to wear shoes while at home. 

_But I live here_ , she thought. _What?_

“This is Max,” said the girl as they approached. “I found her in the cellar.” 

Max waved awkwardly. “Hello.” 

Michael looked her over. “I’m Michael. Most call me Mike. What are you wearing britches for?” 

Max bristled. “Who wears suspenders anymore?” Something about his tone irked her, even though he hadn’t been rude. Her jeans seemed to be a source of confusion for the two in front of her. 

His eyebrows scrunched together for a moment but he only shrugged. “I just never saw a girl wear them before. Come to think of it, I never saw any like yours either.” 

The girl reached out for the cloth Max was holding. “Let’s go sit by the water,” she offered. They led the way as Max followed, and the three of them ended up under a shady tree by the creek’s edge. 

“Wait, you didn’t tell me your name,” said Max, turning towards the girl. 

She seemed to be embarrassed. “Sorry,” she said softly. “Sometimes I forget. My name is Eleanora, but you can call me El or Nora.” 

“The _priest_ calls you Nora,” snorted Mike. “It makes you sound like an elderly lady. El is much more fresh, in my opinion.” 

Eleanora glared at him. “I am an adult, _Michael._ ”

“You’re seventeen.”

She continued to stare pointedly at him until he relented. 

“Fine, Miss adult. Say what you want. I don’t think myself an adult yet and I’m older than you, but to each his own,” he said. 

“Thank you,” said El primly, unwrapping her cloth to reveal a sizable chunk of bread and a thick slice of cheese.

Max looked between them. She couldn’t be one hundred percent sure, but she was nearly certain that there was something going on with them. Maybe not at the moment, but she thought she could sense a tension between the two that indicated… something.

Mike didn’t say anything else as he leaned back against the tree, so El initiated the conversation.

“So where do you come from? Must be a mighty strange place if they let you go around without a skirt,” she remarked, handing Max a piece of the cheese. “Why were you hiding in the cellar anyway?”

Max stared at the ground, unsure whether to share her theory or if they would think she was crazy. 

“I’m from here,” she finally said. “But not from… _here._ I have an idea but you’re going to think I’m insane.”

The two of them looked at her curiously, as if they didn’t believe that any explanation she could give would be baffling to such an extent.

“Share it anyway,” said Mike. “We aren’t going to hurt you.” 

She took a deep breath and prepared herself. “What’s the date?” 

El blinked at her in confusion. “What’s that got to do with anything?” 

“It’ll confirm my theory.” 

“It’s May… twenty-ninth, I believe,” offered Mike. 

“And the year?” Asked Max, her trepidation building. 

“1863,” he answered. 

“Right,” she said. “So, I live in that house. My family just moved in two days ago,” she explained. “But last I checked, it was September 1987.” 

Neither Mike nor El said anything for a few moments, El just ripping off chunks of bread and eating them nervously, until Mike interrupted their silence. 

“That’s impossible,” he said incredulously. “How could you be from over a century into the future?” 

Max shrugged and pulled her knees up to her chest. “I don’t know. I was hiding from my stepbrother in the cellar, and next thing I knew, El was coming in and everything looked completely different.”

There was silence again. 

“Look, I know I sound crazy, but you have to believe me,” pleaded Max. “I don’t know what’s going on either. This isn’t my home.”

El looked up from her bread. “That would explain your strange clothes,” she said. “Women don’t wear dresses in the future?” 

“In my time, people wear whatever they want,” Max answered. “Lots of women still wear dresses and skirts, I just prefer pants.”

El shrugged as if that satisfied her and continued to eat. 

“There has to be another explanation,” asserted Mike. “Time travel doesn’t exist.” 

Max was starting to be annoyed by him. What other explanation could there be? 

“I don’t know what else to say,” she replied. “I can’t convince you.”

El and Mike looked at each other, almost as though having a conversation, before El kneeled and shook out her apron. 

“I have to get back to work,” she said. “But Mike will take you to town. Maybe you can find help there.” 

Max got the feeling Mike didn’t like the idea, but she was grateful they hadn’t run screaming the second they saw her.

She waited by the wall of the house, out of sight of the windows, watching as El went back inside and Mike disappeared around the corner of the porch to find his boots. Max wasn’t sure what was going to come of this trip into town, as she didn’t think it would be useful if she really was where she thought she was. If it truly was 1863, going to town would only prove it and would be no help getting back.

But maybe… maybe this was all some hugely elaborate prank and going to town would reveal it. It seemed like a stretch, but then again so did the idea that time travel was real. 

“Let’s be on our way,” said Mike as he approached. “Town is at least an hour’s walk.”

“An _hour_?” Asked Max. “Isn’t there a faster way?” 

He looked her over. “What, like a horse? We only have one and my mother would notice right away if I took her out.”

Max stood still for a second and Mike grumbled something else under his breath as he walked in the direction of the road. 

“What did you say?” She asked as she caught up to him. 

He glanced at her quickly and his gaze slid to the house behind them, then back to their destination. “I said my ma isn’t likely to take any explanation. She’s a busybody. Knows everyone’s business. She’d know you’re a stranger.” 

As they emerged from the treeline, Max was shocked to find that the road was no longer paved (although in the back of her mind, was she really?). It was made of dirt and dust rose where Mike stepped onto it. 

“Sounds like my mom,” she said acidly. “At least before we moved here.” 

“You don’t get along with your ma?” 

“You don’t get along with yours?” 

They looked at each other at the same moment, and Max saw the hint of a smile in his face. 

The dirt road stretched out in front of them endlessly, but Max noticed that the area wasn’t much different. It was all trees and road, interspersed with fields, the same as she had seen on her way to school. That was a comfort, at least. Fifteen minutes had gone by in silence before Mike spoke again. 

“She’s not so bad,” he said. “My ma,” he added, upon registering Max’s confused expression. “She just cares too much about other people. Family reputation, and the like.” 

Max hummed in assent. Her mom wasn’t dissimilar. “Mine was like that too, before we moved. She knew everyone in our neighbourhood. I think she’ll just need some time here before she’s back to it.” 

“Where did you live, before?”

“California.” 

Mike whistled. “That’s far west, isn’t it? How long did it take you to get all the way here?”

“Well, I didn’t move from there,” said Max. She didn’t know what had made her say it, she barely remembered moving from California at all. “I lived there a long time ago. Before I came here I lived in Indianapolis.”

“You know the city well, then?” 

She supposed she did. She had spent most of her life living in it, after all. 

The pair went on in silence. Max struggled to think of things to say. She didn’t really like walking alone in such a deserted place with a boy she didn’t know and didn’t trust. He likely didn’t trust her either. Luckily he didn’t seem anything like Billy, or like the type of boys Max strived to avoid at school. 

“Tell me,” he said after a while, “If you really are from the future, who wins the war?”

She stumbled over a tree root. “What war?” 

Mike stared at her. “The one that has those Confederates thinking they’re a different country than the rest of us.” 

_Right._ The Civil War was happening at this time. Had been for a few years, if Max’s history classes had taught her anything. 

“The Union does,” she replied. “Not for a few years I think, but they will eventually.” 

“And the slaves? Will it be better for them?” 

Max was surprised by this line of questioning. For a man of this time, she wouldn’t have expected it. 

“Not really,” she answered. “Slavery gets abolished but black people essentially have no rights for about another hundred years. And even then, in my time, it could be a lot better than it is. Why?” 

It reminded her of her possible new friend Lucas for a second, and she wondered if his ancestors were among those imprisoned on southern plantations. It was a terrible thought, but it made the concept she’d barely been taught about in school horribly real. Lucas was a person that she knew, and to think of what generations upon generations of his family had been forced to experience at the hands of people who looked like her made her feel sick.

“Well, because I think it’s unconstitutional and disgusting,” said Mike, and that was the second time he surprised Max in a matter of a minute. Who would’ve thought that someone brought up in 1850s Indiana would know what ‘unconstitutional’ meant? 

It seemed he could see her surprise reflected in her expression because he continued. “I went to school in town for a few years, until I got to be old enough and times were hard enough that I was needed on the farm. But I never stopped learning. One of our neighbours has a large collection of books and lets me read ‘em sometimes.” 

Max wasn’t sure how to reply with anything but ‘that’s nice’, which she was going to say, but Mike had at last found something worthwhile to talk about. 

“Did you go to school, living in the city and all?” He asked curiously. 

She nodded. “I was at school today, before I came here.” 

He paused as if considering her words. “Here, to the past?” 

She nodded again, hoping that he was starting to believe her even though she wasn’t quite sure that she believed herself. 

“So you really do believe you come from the future, then?” 

Max wanted to make a noise; say something, but her stomach was twisted into a knot so tight she felt like she couldn’t breathe. What if this was real and she couldn’t go back? Home wasn’t great, but the idea of being _stuck_ in a time unrecognizable to her was even worse. Why was she here in the first place? Was she meant to change something? 

“I don’t know what I believe,” she said weakly. “None of this makes any sense. All I’m hoping for is that when we get to town I’ll see this is all some elaborate prank, ‘cause there’s no way someone changed the whole town to fit this.”

Mike seemed to agree although he didn’t respond. With every step forward she took, Max felt an impending sense of doom and wanted to run away back to the house, but she knew she needed to press on. In order to distract herself, she asked her companion something that had been at the back of her mind since meeting him and El. 

“What’s going on with you and El?” 

He seemed startled by the question. “What do you mean?” 

The pinkness coming into his face gave Max some amusement; it was also a signal that this was a topic of embarrassment for him. 

“Are you, you know…?” 

“Courting? No, we are not,” he replied shortly. 

“But you wish you were,” Max teased lightly. 

Mike looked away. “I don’t wish for anything she wouldn’t want. She’s very important to me.” 

“How do you know her?” 

He picked at the edge of a suspender nervously. “Her parents died in a fire when she was a child, so her aunt raised her,” he said. “I knew her then because we both went to school. But her aunt died a few years back and she had nowhere else to go, so my mother took her on as a hired girl. She works for my family.”

“And you like her.” 

“I suppose I do. And you? Got a fella at home?” 

Max’s mind jumped to Lucas for a second, but then she shook her head. “I don’t know anyone yet.”

Mike looked like he was going to say something else, but his eyes narrowed as he looked into the distance. 

He held a hand to his forehead to block the sun and squinted a bit. “There’s the gristmill,” he said. “We’ll be in town soon.”

Sure enough, within minutes Max could see the outline of buildings appearing down the road, and the sense of foreboding rushed back full force. Nothing was familiar. Where were the cookie cutters she’d passed on her way to and from school? 

The edge of the town gave her her answer. Those houses were over 100 years into the future. All the buildings around her were built out of clapboard except what Max recognized as the town hall, which stood in the same spot on Main Street and was built of stone. 

She froze in place, shock coursing through her. Here was her proof: it really _was_ 1863\. That meant that everything she knew was 124 years ahead of her. Every person she’d ever met, every place she’d been, didn’t exist yet as she knew it. Her own birth wouldn’t even happen until 1971. 

She was adrift in time, with no idea how to get back.

* * *

Max had sat down hard on the grass at the side of the dirt road, staring. Mike had kept walking for a few moments, until he realized she wasn’t with him and turned back around. 

“Are you alright?” He’d asked. 

No, she was very much not alright. Nothing about this situation was good, and Max didn’t know what she should do about it.

He sat down beside her and didn’t say anything for a while. Max was glad for the silence, as it made it easier for her to try and sort her racing thoughts. 

This was real. How would she go home? Could it even be done? She was hit with a pang of hopelessness and terror, and all of a sudden she realized that she wanted her mother. There was a part of Max’s brain that said an adult would know what to do, even though the rest of it told her her mother would be just as at a loss as she was. 

“Max?” Came a voice from beside her. Who was that again?

“Do you want some water?” A hand followed the voice, holding a flask out to her.

Max took it gratefully and drank, the fresh water clearing her mind for a moment.

“I think I need to go back,” she said. “The root cellar.” 

She saw Mike nod from the corner of her eye. “I promise I’ll help you however I can.” He paused. “But since I’m here, I should get a few things for my mother.” 

Max waited for him to say something else, but he didn’t. “Okay. I’ll stay here.” 

“Go further away so nobody sees you,” advised Mike. “The bushes will hide you. I shouldn’t be long.” 

He went into the town and returned a scant twenty minutes later with a paper bag and a bolt of a plaid brown fabric tucked under his arm. On the way back, Max didn’t feel much like making conversation anymore, but he told her all about the contents of the bag anyway. Apparently he’d got his mother some buttons of several sizes, and he embarrassedly told Max that the blue ribbon was a new hat ribbon he was going to give to El to match her Sunday dress. It made Max smile.

Neither of them said much else, but somehow the walk back to the farm seemed to go quicker than the walk to town had and they could soon see the path that led from the road to the front of the house.

As soon as she caught sight of the house through the trees, Max broke into a run. She needed to get to the root cellar. The afternoon sun beat down harshly, making Max’s sweaty hair stick to her face. She heard Mike call out to her and start after her, but the items he carried bogged him down and he didn’t catch up. Luckily for Max, there was no one in the yard and she went straight for the doors of the cellar. 

It was dark and cool inside, just as it had been earlier, and Max leaned against the wall to catch her breath. Nothing outside sounded like it had changed, but she couldn’t tell yet in the pitch black underground.

After a few moments, she decided to go back outside. If it hadn’t worked, she wasn’t sure what she would do, but to her relief she felt the bottom step give a little under her foot as she stepped onto it. It was plain packed dirt; the wood was gone. As she pushed open the doors, the orange light of sunset lit the dark, and Max saw what she’d seen originally: an empty hole in the ground. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max does some exploring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey everyone! i have no idea if anyone will still be reading this cuz it's been like a solid 3 months since i last updated...
> 
> unfortunately a family member of mine passed away over the summer so it was a bit of an adjustment. i've also been busy with work and other activities, and i've gone back to school after a year's break so i've had quite a bit of stuff to get used to managing. 
> 
> on the flip side, i do have most of this story planned out already so it's just a matter of finding time to write. that being said, i do need to focus on school so i don't know how frequently i'll update. i guess we'll have to see!
> 
> thank you so much to anyone who is still reading and let me know what you thought!

When Max came out of the cellar, the sun was still setting. Everything looked the same as it had the moment she’d gone in. How could it be possible? She’d been gone for at least a few hours. Her mom probably wasn’t even home yet. Had she imagined it all? She didn’t remember hitting her head anywhere.

She climbed out slowly and made her way toward the house, which was old and peeling again. An eerie feeling settled over her. Now that she’d seen the house differently, it looked like it was dead; a shell of its former glory. It was a ghost house. 

The clock on the kitchen wall indicated that it was 7:27, so essentially no time at all had passed in the present. Max could even hear Billy blasting music from his room, proving that she was back home in 1987. 

“What the hell,” she whispered to herself. Wherever she’d been the last few hours had felt so real, and looking down at her shoes Max saw that it had been. They were covered in dust from the road. 

She needed to find out more. Hadn’t her mom said there was some kind of document showing previous owners of the property? Max rifled through all the drawers in the kitchen looking for anything that might point her in the right direction, but she didn’t find anything. Her mom or Neil must have moved it. 

Just to her luck, there was the sound of a key scraping in the lock on the front door, and in came her mom, laden with a bag of takeout. 

“Hi, Maxie,” said Ms. Mayfield. “Can you call your brother down for dinner?” 

Max didn’t even argue with her this time, just called for Billy up the stairs and then turned back to her mom in the entryway.

“Did you say we had a paper that told us the owners of this house?” She asked. 

Ms. Mayfield looked surprised. “Yes, it’s with the rest of the sale documents. Why?” 

At that moment Neil chose to walk in with a box that carried a lamp for the living room, so Max stopped. 

“I just have a project for one of my classes already, I’ll tell you about it at dinner,” she said quickly. “Neil, do you need some help?”

* * *

After they’d eaten, Max’s mom went upstairs to her bedroom where the documents were kept. 

“Here we are,” said Ms. Mayfield as she came back into the hallway. She held out a blue file folder to Max. 

Opening it, she saw that it held photocopies of several documents. “Thanks, Mom,” she replied distractedly, walking into her own room. Hopefully something in there would prove to her whether or not she’d had a hallucination. 

Max spread the copies out on her desk, looking for one that had a list of names. At last, she came across a paper that said “Chain of Title” across the top with a list of names and dates under it. The first thing she noticed was that the copy showed the original had sustained extensive water damage, but her finger followed the date column until she found 1860-1864, then across to where it said that the owner was a Karen Wheeler. The last name checked out, but… The name under it was Michael. 

Max sat down in her chair. Karen must have been the “missus” El referred to; the mother Mike didn’t seem to get along with very well, and he must have inherited the property after she… died? The name before her was Edward, and it was indicated that he was deceased in 1860, but it wasn’t indicated that Karen was deceased in 1864. So maybe it was just that her son had come of age and the ownership of the property had passed to him. It must’ve been willed by the father (Edward?) while Mike was underage and so gone to his mother for a time.

Unfortunately, the rest of the document was illegible. Max couldn’t tell what year the property had passed from Mike to someone else. It could’ve been in the same year it had gone to him, for all she knew, or maybe he’d lived to be a hundred years old and it only changed hands in the 40s.

Either way, this was proof that he’d existed, meaning Max couldn’t have imagined where she’d been. She hadn’t known the names of anyone who’d lived in this house before her family. So what was the deal with the root cellar? Was it some kind of time machine? Had someone built one and buried it in the ground? She doubted she’d ever have answers.

The next morning at school, she was thinking about what to do when she saw Lucas in the hall. She should tell him! He might think she was making it up, but he might also believe her, and maybe he would help her investigate. She ran ahead to catch up to him. 

“Lucas!” 

He turned around. “Oh, hey, Max.” 

“Can we talk at lunch?” She asked. “Something happened.” 

Lucas looked concerned. “Are you okay?” 

Max nodded quickly. “I’m fine, but I need to talk to someone. Can you meet me on the bleachers?”

“Sure,” he agreed slowly, narrowing his eyes. “Is this about what you asked me yesterday?”

The warning bell rang, announcing one minute to class. “We don’t have time right now, but yes,” she replied. “Sort of.” 

Max started backwards, heading in the direction of the gym.

“Sort of?” Called Lucas, raising his arms in confusion. 

“I’ll explain!”

She spent the whole of PE distracted by thoughts of how she would explain what happened to her the day before. She had come up with no way for any of it to make sense other than to explain it concisely, and Lucas gave her no opportunity to gather her thoughts because he was already sitting on the bleachers when she got there.

“Hey,” he greeted. 

“Hey,” Max replied as she sat. “So this is gonna sound really crazy, but…” 

And she explained it all as best she could, starting from the first vision of the house and the apparition in the yard all the way to coming back out of the root cellar to find no time had passed. 

Lucas looked more and more skeptical as Max went on. By the end of it, he sat with his arms crossed and his eyebrows raised. 

“So you want me to believe that you somehow went back in time?” He said. “Do you realize how crazy that sounds?” 

Max huffed. “I  _ know  _ it sounds insane,” she retorted. “But here, my mom had this and she showed me it after I asked.” 

She handed him the chain of title. 

“It’s damaged and you can’t read all of it, but it was enough for me to know they were real,” she said as he scrutinized the paper in his hands.

Lucas didn’t say anything for a few moments as he examined the document, but finally: 

“This is pretty solid evidence,” he admitted. “If you hadn’t seen it before then you wouldn’t have known the name to imagine it if you hallucinated, or something.”

“Exactly!” 

“But,” he added, “I think we should do more research. Maybe we can find more records about your house.” 

“Where should we start?”

* * *

Lucas had suggested they might go to the library or even town hall to take a look, but he couldn’t go until the next week. His grandparents were visiting, so his mom wanted him home. 

Max didn’t mind waiting all that much; what she really wanted was to try and figure out if she could make it work again. She had been scared the first time, but she figured it was because it was all so unexpected. Now that she really considered all that had happened, it didn’t seem so bad. She got the impression she’d be good friends with the pair she met if only she had time to actually know them. In any case, it was better than having to deal with Billy, who hadn’t yet managed to land a job and was becoming increasingly bad-tempered. 

That very afternoon, she went out into the yard and contemplated the cellar doors. How had it worked last time? Could she just throw open the doors and go inside? She doubted it worked that way but she figured she should try anyway. 

When that didn’t work, Max stood outside again and decided maybe she needed to think hard about where she wanted to go, so she thought hard about exactly how she’d seen the house and the people she’d met and kept all of that in the forefront of her mind as she went back in and closed the doors. This time she stayed in the dark for a bit longer, hoping she would feel something shift. 

She didn’t, and when she climbed the stairs out everything was still the same. She pushed the doors closed again. 

“Why aren’t you working?!” She yelled. 

Max kicked one of the doors in frustration and immediately regretted it, her toes stinging as she pivoted on the spot and walked back to the house.

She decided to do some homework instead and try the cellar again later.

When Billy got home though, he started mowing the grass instead of coming inside, and Max didn’t want him to see her. She knew it would look weird and she wouldn’t be able to explain herself in a way that didn’t make her sound crazy, so she stayed in her room. Her thoughts spun.

Out of the blue, as if the thought was sent to her, she remembered that on moving day she’d seen a trapdoor in the ceiling of the upstairs hallway, right by her room. Attics were always places where people kept secrets, weren’t they? Who knew what she might find up there, and while Billy was still occupied with the yard Max wasn’t going to venture outside again. 

She dragged her chair out into the hall with her and looked up; there it was, a square in the ceiling with a little hook on it to pull open. When she opened the door, she felt a weight seem to drop down with it, so she hopped off her chair and let the door go. A ladder unfolded on top of the chair. 

Max hadn’t thought about how she’d have gotten into the attic after opening it, but clearly whoever had made it had thought ahead of her. She moved her chair out of the way and looked up into the dark hole in the ceiling, and for a moment she thought she saw the swish of a skirt disappearing into it at the top. Could it have been-?

She climbed up and found herself at the top of the house. It was incredibly dusty, seeming like no one had been there in a long time. There was one window facing the side, letting in a dirty stream of light, and the room was empty. So much for secrets, then. Max sat down by the window and hugged her knees to her chest, letting the weak sunlight warm her a little. 

Again, she was reminded of Dustin. He would have been having the time of his life trying to solve whatever mystery there was in this house. He had such a naturally curious personality; this type of thing would have been right up his alley. That sudden burning pain of grief came to her, choking and suffocating her in its grip. Why did he have to go? 

She wasn’t ready for him to be gone. He’d had so many dreams, so many things to live for… all things he would never get to experience. Things he would never see himself accomplish. Only because she’d convinced him to go for a drive with her. If she’d never… 

Max squeezed her eyes shut tighter, trying not to let tears escape, but she couldn’t control the choked sob that came out. It wasn’t fair. She needed her best friend with her, not this empty gaping hole in her life where he used to be. They were supposed to go out into the world and become adults together. It wasn’t supposed to be Max on her own. She didn’t think she could do it alone. 

She hit the wall with the side of her fist in anger, and to her surprise a section of the baseboard popped out a little bit. Curious, Max wiped her face and pried it further open to peek into the space. There was something glinting back there. Sticking her hand in, she grasped something cold and metal, suspecting that it was a key. When she brought it out into the light, she saw that it was. How strange. Why was there a key hidden in the baseboard in the attic? 

She blew on it and wiped it on her shorts to get rid of some of the dust and cobwebs. It was a pretty standard looking key, by  _ antique _ standards. Max wondered what it might open. Maybe there was something up here that she hadn’t noticed before, so she got up and walked around. Her second round of the attic didn’t reveal anything obvious, but now that she knew there was a secret baseboard space, maybe there was another trapdoor in the floor that nobody knew about.

After shuffling between all four walls twice, hoping to reveal something, Max sat down by the window again and did a visual sweep. And there it was. 

She didn’t know how she hadn’t seen it before, but there was another little hook sticking out of the floor near the back corner, just like the one in the attic door she’d come through. Max made her way over and tried to pull it up. It wouldn’t budge at first, nothing like the main door, but with enough force Max was able to get this new trapdoor open. 

Under it was a set of very narrow stairs that led straight into darkness and Max cursed, wishing she’d thought of a flashlight. Standing still for a second, she waited to hear the lawn mower, and when she did she went straight for the ladder back down to the second floor. Billy was still busy, which bought her some time. 

Luckily, a flashlight was still on top of her dresser from the other night when she’d used it to inspect the yard, so she was back in the attic in a minute. When she shone the light down into the hole in the floor, she saw that the stairs didn’t go very far, seemingly ending somewhere on the level below her. 

Cautiously, Max descended the stairs. Why were old stairs always so small? She felt as though she were in danger of breaking her neck with every step. Soon her light hit the floor at the bottom, and Max saw that she was in a room. It was narrow, but she guessed it was about the same length as her bedroom. On the left side there was a section of wall that extended further inward, like the backside of an alcove. In the opposite corner stood a wooden chest. Could the key be for that? 

Other than the chest the room was empty, similarly to the attic. The left wall was interesting though, so Max walked over to inspect it. It must be the backside of another room. What was underneath this section of the attic? Could it be her closet? She shone the light around and saw the outline of a doorway positioned in the narrow end of the wall. She pushed against it and was surprised to find that it gave a little.

“Come on,” she whispered. “You can open.” 

She pushed against it again but it seemed to be stuck on something on the other side. Max did have boxes inside her closet after all. If this was what she thought it was, the door was already open enough for her to see it from the other side, so she left it alone. Going back to the chest, she pulled out the key. 

The key only fit into the lock after a bit of finagling, but Max figured it probably wouldn’t have fit at all if it wasn’t the right one. As she opened it, Max was hit with a smell she could only describe as  _ old _ : musty and dusty; the smell of something that hadn’t been opened in a long time. Inside the chest she found a stack of handkerchiefs, slightly yellowed by age but not as much as could be expected. Some were embroidered with E I and the rest with E W. Could they have belonged to the girl she’d met, El? Possibly, but Max didn’t know her surname. Beside those lay an embroidery hoop, which was only recognizable because Max had seen her grandmother using one often when she was little. 

That was all, and Max was a little disappointed she hadn’t found anything more interesting in the chest. At least there was the secret room. It could prove useful if she ever needed to hide something. She did wonder why the builders of the house had made it, though. Sighing as she went back up to the attic, she realized she was more disappointed to not have found anything that pointed her in the direction of answers. She still had no clue what the deal was with the root cellar, or how it worked. And she wanted to make it work. There had to have been a reason she was the only one seeing things, and there had to have been a reason that she was transported through time.

Back in her room, with the attic door closed and everything restored to the usual, Max opened her closet and confirmed that the other door she’d found did lead into it. A section of the wall in the back was open, butted up against the stack of boxes full of items Max hadn’t had time to look through yet. She pushed it closed, deciding not to go back in, and found that it moved both ways.  _ Useful,  _ she thought. 

When she turned around and got out of the closet, her room was transformed. The girl she’d met the day before- El- was making the bed. A bed that was decidedly not Max’s. 

“What the-” She spluttered. “El? How did I get here?” 

She didn’t reply, and Max stood there stunned until the bedroom door opened and someone else came in- the boy, Mike. He seemed to say something to El and she seemed to hear it, but Max didn’t hear anything come out of their mouths. The two of them walked out and Max followed, but when she got to the hall there was no one there. They’d disappeared into thin air. She did a double take when she saw that her room was completely hers again. It looked as though she’d just had another vision. 

What the hell was going on?


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey yall so i wrote this like immediately after i posted the last chap but i wanted to wait a little so i could have time to write the next one!! chap 6 is not done yet tho :( HOWEVER, it is started and this week is pretty much my busiest week of the semester so once the next few days are through i should have more time!! 
> 
> also i have a midterm in 40 minutes so OOF wish me luck
> 
> happy reading!!

A week and a half after the initial incident, Max still hadn’t managed to find a way through the cellar. She’d tried everything she could think of: waiting until sunset, running out when Billy antagonized her again, sitting inside for longer and longer amounts of time in the hopes that something would  _ happen.  _ She’d already had the thought countless times that had Dustin been there, he would’ve figured it out already. He was good at puzzles and had an incredible memory. There had to be  _ something  _ that hadn’t occurred to her yet. 

Also disappointingly, she and Lucas hadn’t found much conclusive at the library or town hall.

(“Is that everything?” 

“That’s everything I could find, Max.” 

“Should we ask the clerk?”) 

The clerk at town hall had told them that a lot of paperwork had been lost in a fire that destroyed the south wing in 1909. So much for that avenue of research, then. The library kept records for the schools, but nothing as far back as the 1850s was in an easily accessible place. The librarian had said they could come back in a few days and see if she’d found anything. 

So there she was… unable to do anything. Max had exhausted all the options she could think of, and so the afternoon found her sitting on the front porch, tightening the wheels on her skateboard. She’d felt them a bit looser when she was on her way home from school earlier. Lucas hadn’t come home with her as he’d gone to the library to work on a group project for another class, but he’d said he’d come by if the librarian  _ had  _ managed to find anything for them.

She was taking a liking to him, and she thought he might be, too. He’d invited her to sit with his friends at lunch almost immediately after meeting her, but she hadn’t worked up the courage to do it yet. She wasn’t sure why, but maybe she just wasn’t ready for new friends. However much she liked him, though, she was a little afraid of what Billy’s and Neil’s reactions to seeing Lucas might be if they were home when he came over. She didn’t think they knew that their neighbours were a black family. 

Billy had at least found a job at the rec centre on Main, but it wouldn’t start for a few days and he was home all the time until then. Luckily it meant his mood was hugely improved, but still. Hopefully he wouldn’t do something stupid if Lucas paid them a visit. 

Lucas showing up that same afternoon was a double-edged sword. Billy was inside, right in the living room which made the front porch a highly accessible view, but it also meant that something had been found at the library, which might give them clues. Max saw him coming up the path through the trees holding something, and as he drew closer she thought it looked like a plate.

“Hey,” he said as he stopped in front of her. “My mom sends cookies to our new neighbours.” 

“She didn’t have to,” Max replied, setting her skateboard down to take the plate. “But thanks. They smell good.” 

She smiled at him. Lucas smiled back, and neither of them said anything for a moment until Max put the plate down as well. 

“So what did she find? I’m assuming that’s what you’re really here for,” she said. 

Lucas shuffled awkwardly, reaching into his back pocket to pull out a piece of paper. “She almost didn’t let me have a photocopy, but this is what there was. I think that’s your guy.” 

He was pointing at a name near the bottom of a list of students enrolled at the single schoolhouse that had existed in 1853, and there was that Michael Wheeler again. Max snatched the paper from him for a closer look. 1853 was ten years before the day she’d arrived, which would make the Mike she’d met a child at the time. It seemed right. 

“Was there anything else?” She asked. 

Lucas shook his head. “Not much,” he responded. “I only copied this page but there were a few more and it looked like he was only in school until 1860.” 

Max’s mind was going a mile a minute trying to connect the dots. The previous owner of the property before Karen Wheeler had been an Edward who’d died in 1860, and what had Mike told her? He’d only been in school “until times were hard enough” for him to be needed at home. It all made sense. 

“It makes sense, Lucas,” she said quickly. “With what I found in the house documents and what I- what he told me. It has to be real.” 

Lucas nodded. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Max. I just don’t know how it’s possible.”

She stood up. “Do you want to see it?” 

Lucas shrugged and Max started walking towards the back of the house. She thought she might have seen the front window curtain flutter for a moment, but she wasn’t sure. The root cellar looked as unimpressive as ever and she felt a little unimpressive herself as she showed it to Lucas. He lifted the doors and looked in for a moment, but then let them drop shut again.

“I don’t know what else we can do,” he said. “Maybe it was a weird one-time thing.” 

Max didn’t say anything, but Lucas then brought up something else. “Didn’t you say there was a girl too?” 

She could have smacked herself. How had she forgotten El? Just because the property had belonged to the Wheelers didn’t mean there wouldn’t be anything with El’s name on it somewhere. 

“You’re right!” She exclaimed. “They went to school together, maybe she’s here too.” Max looked at the paper again, but unfortunately she didn’t know El’s surname so she had to go by the first names and that wasn’t how the list was organized. She did find it though, near the top sat the name Eleanora Ives. 

“Holy shit, dude,” she said. Something else had occurred to her. 

“What?” Asked Lucas, moving closer to her to look at the paper himself. 

Max pointed at the name. “She’s here, that’s her. And you know what? Last week I found this old chest thing in a secret room and all it had in it was hankies.” 

“So?”

“ _ So,  _ the initials on some of them were E I! That could’ve been her!” 

Lucas looked skeptical again. “Some of them?” 

Max huffed, exasperated. “The rest had E W but maybe they weren’t hers.” 

“Why would there be hankies from two different people, that’s so random.” 

She crossed her arms. “Do I look like I know why any of this is happening? There could be a million reasons!” 

They both looked at the list again, their eyes drawn to the curly ends of the W… 

“Or maybe,” said Lucas, “W for Wheeler?”

Max considered it. “Maybe she married him. I did think they were acting a little careful around each other. And he pretty much admitted to having feelings.” 

“Do you think the church would know?” 

She shrugged. “Maybe. But until we know more…” 

Lucas seemed to agree. “I should get going too,” he sighed. “Let me know if anything else happens?” 

“I will. That’s a promise.” 

He smiled again, and it warmed Max from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. A tingling feeling blossomed in her chest and she smiled in return. 

“See you,” he replied, and then turned and walked back the way he came. 

Once she couldn’t see him anymore, Max sat down by the root cellar and stared at it. What was she not remembering about the day she’d gone through? There had to be something. It couldn’t have been a one-time thing, she could feel it. She lay back and tried to imagine everything exactly as it had been. 

Annoyingly, the sun was glaring directly into her face, so she moved into the shade of the bushes and short trees around the doors. The shade… shadows! She sat up abruptly. Of course! There had been a shadow cast by one of the trees that split the doors exactly in half. Looking over, Max was irritated to find she’d have to wait to test this new theory. The doors were still mostly in the sunlight, as it wasn’t late enough in the day yet for the shadows to be long. Frustrated, she went back to the front of the house to continue fixing her board and maybe taste some of Mrs. Sinclair’s cookies while she waited.

* * *

Max had sat restlessly, getting up every quarter hour to go check the doors, and had eventually moved to sit at the back to keep an eye on them. She didn’t want to miss the moment after all this stress over it. In the end she did almost miss it, distracted as she was by a rabbit she’d seen hopping along the treeline, but caught it just in time. This time, Max threw open the doors and descended with confidence. This was going to work. It had to. 

Just like all the times she’d tried and failed in the week before, she didn’t feel anything change. She was going defeatedly towards the stairs, having mentally declared this her final attempt, but then she felt a wooden step instead of a dirt one. She paused and dug her foot in harder to check, but nothing gave. It was solid wood! She’d done it! 

Excitedly, Max raced up the steps and emerged into the light of dusk, although the temperature was now much lower than where she came from and shockingly, there was snow on the ground. There wasn’t anyone around, it looked like. There were no clothes on the line like last time, and the house was dark. 

She shivered in the cold and didn’t even realize for a second that the darkness of the house didn’t mean anything here.  _ Of course it’s dark,  _ she thought.  _ Electricity’s not a thing yet.  _ So actually, there could very well be people around and she just couldn’t see them. A moment later, she heard voices carrying over the wind, coming from behind her.

Down by the creek were two figures, arguing, and by their voices Max was able to guess that they were actually Mike and El. She’d spent all that time trying to find them again and now she’d stumbled into an argument, so she hid behind a bush to listen. She wasn’t going to leave just yet.

“You don’t need to do this,” came El’s voice. “If they wanted you they would have called for you already.” 

Mike threw his arms up. “Don’t you think I know? I can’t let him go by himself. He was my only friend for a long time, it would feel wrong to let him go to war alone.” 

“And what about me? I don’t mean anything to you?” 

Max peeked out briefly and saw that they both looked like they’d been crying, and that they’d been outside for a while already. Both of their noses and cheeks were chapped red with the cold. 

Mike reached out for El’s hands and pulled her closer. Max felt like she was intruding on something very private, but at the same time she had a feeling she should stay and see what happened. 

“You know that isn’t true,” he said. “You mean  _ everything _ to me. You have to know that.”

El wrenched herself out of his grip and turned away. “Then don’t go,” she responded. “Stay here. We need you here.  _ I  _ need you here.”

“El…” 

“Don’t do that. Don’t say my name like that.” 

“What else do you want me to say?!” He exclaimed. Max was getting colder by the minute. They’d better hurry up or she was going to have to give herself away.

“You know why I have to do this! Will isn’t- he won’t handle it well on his own, he’s too soft. And my father-”

El turned back around suddenly, her features twisted angrily. “Your father died four years ago! Why does anything he ever said to you still matter?” 

Mike’s face went stony, and for a second Max thought he’d seen her, but then he spoke again. “I can’t stand around and be useless anymore, El. Fighting this war…it’ll end soon and I’ll have been part of the reason it’s over. We can’t live like this forever.”

El only shook her head, her hand pressed to her mouth. 

“Listen to me,” he said, taking her hands again. “I’m going to come back. I promise you I’ll come back. No reb is going to stop me. All I need to go on is knowing that you’re safe. If you’re still here I have something to come back to, you understand?” 

El didn’t respond, but Mike seemed to take that as his answer. “Eleanora Ives, I swear to you that when I come back you will have a man worthy of being your husband. A million times over what I am now.” 

“I would take you now,” she replied. “I would have done the same yesterday. And I will tomorrow and all the days after.”

It was quite sweetly heartbreaking, but Max would’ve appreciated the emotion more if she wasn’t freezing her ass off. Luckily, Mike stepped away, as if he was going to cross the creek, but then he stopped and looked at El again. Suddenly the pair surged toward each other and Max looked away, feeling like she’d already intruded enough. A few seconds later, Mike’s voice came again. 

“I love you.” 

“Write to me.” 

“I will,” he promised, and then jumped over the creek and disappeared into the woods. Max watched as El stood there alone, and decided she’d better take the chance and go home. She wasn’t sure what to do with what she’d just seen and didn’t think El would appreciate the suddenness of her arrival. 

Strangely, the root cellar was warm, in stark contrast to what was outside. Then Max popped out in  _ her  _ backyard again, her skateboard sitting where she’d left it next to the plate of cookies from Lucas’ mom. 

Right. She’d promised to tell Lucas if anything happened, but she didn’t want to tell him about this. It seemed too private. She sort of felt like she shouldn’t have been there either, but at the same time like she was meant to be. Like it was important that she be.

Either way, she was still freezing. She needed to go shower and warm up. 


End file.
